Hit Maker

Can boxing be made to look believable on Broadway?

The movement director Steven Hoggett with the stars of the musical “Rocky.”Credit Illustration by Stamatis Laskos

In the upstairs lobby of the Winter Garden Theatre, a few Fridays ago, two men were beating each other up. Or not exactly. They were rehearsing the fight that comes at the end of “Rocky,” a musical that is scheduled to open on March 13th. The show was inspired by Sylvester Stallone’s 1976 movie, “Rocky,” which tells of Rocky Balboa, a going-nowhere semi-pro boxer who lives next to an El in North Philadelphia and makes his living as a collector for a loan shark. By a fluke, Rocky is challenged to an exhibition fight with the world heavyweight champion, Apollo Creed, also known as the Master of Disaster. Written by and starring Stallone, “Rocky” was nominated for ten Oscars and won three, including Best Picture. The scene at the end of his training, in which he runs up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and dances a triumphal little jig at the top, has become a sort of cultural icon. (The city’s commerce director said that Stallone had done more for Philadelphia than anyone since Benjamin Franklin.) “Rocky” went on to have five sequels. The movies have earned more than a billion dollars at the box office.

It is no surprise, then, that “Rocky” has once again been reborn, this time as a musical. It has a book by Stallone and Thomas Meehan, direction by Alex Timbers (“Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,” “Peter and the Starcatcher”), music by Stephen Flaherty, lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, and choreography by Steven Hoggett and by Kelly Devine. The two men assaulting each other in the Winter Garden lobby were Terence Archie, a large, splendidly built man, who plays Apollo, and Andy Karl (“Wicked,” “Jersey Boys”)—who is smaller than Archie, as is appropriate to the story, but also a fine specimen—as Rocky.

As they went at each other, Patrick McCollum, the associate fight choreographer, hovered on the sidelines, calling out counts: one through eight, over and over. Standing next to McCollum, and issuing instructions, corrections, and compliments, was Hoggett, a forty-two-year-old Englishman who has big ears and bright eyes—he looks like an alert animal—and dresses like a stagehand. Though he is listed in the program as a choreographer, he is actually a “movement director,” and he is the person who designed the fight. Movement directors have probably been at work in the theatre since Periclean Athens. In any case, they now have a name, and they are there to make movement more expressive, suggestive, symbolic.

In the fight that Hoggett created for “Rocky,” Karl looks down much of the time—an expression of Rocky’s underdog position. Archie, as Apollo, has his face up, to the light. He is vainglorious, sure that he will knock Rocky out. He’ll soon discover otherwise. So the characters’ bearing, as much as their more pronounced actions—and their words—creates the drama. To make that happen, the director, the actor, and the movement director (if there is one) collaborate. Asked if this doesn’t represent a poaching on the director’s prerogatives, Hoggett says that things aren’t that way anymore. The process is more fluid. “I don’t think I know any directors, of my generation, who still work in that old style, where it’s all blocked, and this actor goes there and that one walks past the samovar.”

In “Rocky,” Hoggett had an additional task. He had to design a fight that, to people not involved in the profession, would look more or less like the real thing. And unlike filmed boxing, where the cameras can do a lot for you, his fight had to look real from right, left, and center: everywhere the audience would be. Therefore the men did have to hit each other, but without hurting each other. This is possible, Hoggett says, because boxing is concentrated, enclosed: “It’s not like a field-hockey game, where the ball can fly in from anywhere and hit you. Boxing’s just you and one other person.” So you can control what happens. “Mike Tyson would go for this part of your nose,” Hoggett said, touching the tip of his nose. “What he wants is to drive this part of your nose bone into your brain.” To do that, a boxer has to use the element of surprise.

Accordingly, Hoggett eliminated surprise, by designing every move of the sixteen-minute fight and getting the boxer-actors to memorize the entire scenario. That way, they knew at all times what was coming, and could mount an effective defense. “On counts seven and eight in Round 1,” Hoggett said to Andy Karl, during the rehearsal, “you need to prepare these ribs here, because this is where you’ll get two hooks to the left rib, and then you’re going to return with a hook.” And Karl could immediately call up in his mind what happens on counts seven and eight of Round 1. This is not too different from dance, and Hoggett says so: “Boxing is a duet.” (Or, he corrects himself, a trio. He thinks that many referees move so interestingly, and also so expertly, that they are part of the dance.) But, in the matter of counting, dance is easier, because the counts are being sounded out to the cast by the music. In “Rocky,” the actors have to have it all in their heads.

Are the men never injured? Andy Karl answered reluctantly that he once got a black eye, but that was at the start of rehearsals. Plus, the gloves weren’t sewn quite right. Terence Archie said that he has had no injuries in these New York rehearsals, which makes sense, because he had played Apollo in Hamburg, where the show opened. According to Patrick McCollum, the problem isn’t really injuries: “Getting hit in this fight is like getting hit by a Nerf football. That doesn’t sound so bad, but if it goes on, without stopping, for sixteen minutes, it can be pretty bad.”

While Apollo and Rocky are punching each other, they have to continue acting. Prior to the fight, Hoggett says, “you’ve had an hour and forty minutes of watching a character, Rocky. Now, when he steps into the ring, we need to follow that character through to the end.” He added, “So I’ve got to pick up every storytelling device we’ve used—song, staging, text, acting, the whole thing—and make sure Andy takes those elements and moves them forward rather than just treating the episode as a boxing event. It’s actually a character arc, for him and for Apollo.”

Hoggett believes that the only medium in which he’s truly happy is physical narrative: “I don’t really have a skill set to make work based on just an aesthetic. And technique is something that I can see, but I wouldn’t know how to put any two purely technical moves together. I always want a story.”

Hoggett was born in 1971 in Huddersfield, a grim industrial town, as he describes it, in West Yorkshire. His father started as a carpenter and ended at a desk job. Hoggett went to Swansea University, in Wales, where, hoping to become a journalist, he studied English literature. One night, a friend had an extra ticket to a production of Tony Harrison’s “Medea: Sexwar,” by Volcano, a physical-theatre company that was popular in Britain at that time.

“Physical theatre” is a term that is hard to define, because it covers a wide span. “Is there any kind of theatre that isn’t physical?” Hoggett asks. “Unless you’re in a Beckett play, the chances are you’ll move.” But, at various times, Western playwrights and directors have taken a special interest in movement—heavily designed, forceful movement—as a carrier of meaning on a par with, or even more important than, the script. The last few decades of the twentieth century were such a period. In America, one might point to the Living Theatre, but even that uninhibited collective did not consistently use the aggression, even the violence—one character beating up on another—that, to many, is a basic ingredient of physical theatre. A purer instance would be the German choreographer Pina Bausch, who got her dancers to throw one another into walls and spit at one another.

An even better example would be the group of British companies, including Volcano, DV8, and others, which actually called themselves physical theatre. According to Scott Graham, a schoolmate of Hoggett’s who worked with him for many years, the sort of fury that these companies dealt in fit into the culture-clash politics of the nineteen-eighties and nineties. I saw DV8 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1988. Watching the dancers hurl themselves at one another and trip and punch one another (their name is a pun), I myself felt bruised.

Volcano was the same way, Hoggett says: “It was incredible just watching that explosive energy that they generated, for maybe an hour and ten minutes. I felt quite frightened by it. I’d been to the theatre maybe four times before this, to see something with school, like a ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ and there might be a sword fight. But these guys were tearing into each other. I remember a woman being kicked all the way around the stage.” The Volcano actors did not replace the play’s text with movement, Hoggett says. They kept the script, but “they forced it to surrender.” Hoggett decided that this was what he wanted to do in life. So did a number of his friends.

In his last year of university, Hoggett worked at a fruit-and-vegetable stall, and in a bingo hall: “It was all women, all over sixty-five, all smokers.” After he graduated, he joined Volcano for a year, while waiting for his friends to finish university. Then, in 1994, he, Graham, and another physical-theatre devotee, Vicki Middleton, founded a company that they eventually called Frantic Assembly. They started with four performers: Graham, Hoggett, and two women, also from Swansea. They got a telephone, and installed it in Hoggett’s room. Middleton booked the tours.

On video, Frantic Assembly’s way of moving sometimes looks harmless. But even when it’s not aggressive it is often manipulative. One person’s hand slips under another person’s, and raises it. The second person doesn’t have much say in the matter. In other pieces, the action is thundering. The participants launch themselves through the air, one by one, onto a small bed, or they jump on top of one another, or back one another into walls while brandishing knives. They began with straight drama: in 1994, they produced John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger.” But they didn’t like the stage directions, so, rather than obey them, they came out and read them sarcastically to the audience. (Osborne died soon afterward, Hoggett notes dryly.) In “The Frantic Assembly Book of Devising Theatre,” which Hoggett and Graham published in 2009, they reminisce tenderly about sets that collapsed in the middle of performances, falling on the actors’ feet. They also recall “experiments with dried flowers and petroleum in a flammable dressing room.” They were young. “We took our clothes off a lot in the first few years,” Hoggett says.

The Arts Council of Wales paid Frantic Assembly’s way, barely. “If one of us bought a book, everybody read it,” Hoggett says. “If one of us bought an album, everybody listened to it. Somebody bought the Guardian every day. One of us used to buy dessert. We were with each other all the time, in a van or a rehearsal room or a theatre. There were usually only six or so of us, but it was a real community.” They held workshops; they taught school groups; they put on full-scale productions, and toured them widely. In time, they moved to London.

Twelve years after the company’s founding, the National Theatre of Scotland hired Hoggett, on a freelance basis, to construct the movement and serve as an associate director for a show called “Black Watch” (2006), which dealt with eight members of a Scottish regiment sent to the Iraq War. The show uses shifting time planes and other modernist maneuvers, but it is unswervingly about those eight soldiers, not about the ontology of theatre or whatever. They talk about how they miss the food back home—lemon chicken, cheese on toast. They are frightened, they weep, they come under fire. (The BBC filmed “Black Watch,” and it is a thrill to watch.) Hoggett, who won an Olivier Award for “Black Watch,” in 2009, says that the play was his breakthrough work and also, by association, Frantic Assembly’s. But if, at that time, the company’s status rose, that was probably not just because of Hoggett’s work and Frantic Assembly’s but also because of what had been the troupe’s inching toward character and story, which audiences like. Around that time, Frantic Assembly produced shows for the national theatres of Scotland, Wales, and England. “We were part of the establishment now,” Hoggett says. “We worked for institutions that were good and strong.” At the same time, they were making their own product. “We were part of the ecology of theatre,” he said. “Could anything be more healthy?” Accordingly, he felt he could leave the company, and in 2012 he did.

Since then, most of Hoggett’s time has been spent in mainstream commercial theatre in New York. Among the productions for which he has served as movement director (or choreographer, as he is sometimes listed) are “Peter and the Starcatcher” and “Once,” both in 2011—shows that received a slew of Tony nominations, plus other awards. Last year, he worked on “What’s It All About?,” “The Glass Menagerie,” and the Metropolitan Opera’s “Rigoletto.”

Hoggett had always wanted to work in New York. “I remember my first day, walking to work. I was here!,” he says. Furthermore, his partner lived in New York. Hoggett goes back to England several times a year. “I still have an apartment there, and my mum is there. I find myself missing both.” But then he returns to New York. He thinks that Americans are more receptive to movement instruction. In England, he says, dramatic training is, above all, training in language; that’s what actors and directors think theatre is. People who go in for movement-heavy drama are not the ones who will be chosen to play Hamlet, or who will choose to. Hoggett adds, “And then, in the States, there is a sense of lateral careers. You can be in ‘Chicago,’ and then in a huge TV series, and still be taken seriously in classical theatre. I think that in the U.K. we’ve got a sense of the actor that’s close to the Russian idea of an actor—something incredibly refined. And so we produce these blazingly brilliant performers, but they wouldn’t be in ‘Chicago’ for love nor money.” The situation is changing, but not fast.

“Once,” which is still playing on Broadway, gives a fully developed sense of Hoggett’s idea of what movement directing is, and how it is tied to character and narrative. The show is derived from an endearing 2006 Irish movie of the same title. In Dublin, boy meets girl; they write some songs together (they are both amateur musicians); they part. The conclusion is prefigured in a number of scenes, but there is a moment in which these two (whom the program calls the Girl and the Guy) more or less directly confess their love, and their knowledge that it will come to nothing. They don’t embrace. They don’t even join hands. “That energy of holding two hands—it’s a dead moment,” Hoggett says. It means that the show is going to end. “Either all is well or all is sad. ‘We’re going to hold hands like this in profile to the audience. You’ve got five minutes left.’ ” Instead, in “Once,” the boy simply leans forward, and the girl leans forward, and they touch foreheads. That, and the songs that came out of their heads, is all they’re ever going to have of each other.

“Once” also shows how Hoggett uses his actors to help him construct movement. He dislikes big, splashy numbers where the actors, under the spell of love, or Oklahoma, break into song and dance, and he has had no training in dance, but he does use it, secretly. In “Once,” the Girl and the Guy go to a bank to ask for a loan in order to make a demo tape. The situation is archetypal: art is being played off against commerce. Hoggett accepts this; indeed, he underlines it. The Guy, to convince the loan manager, plays him a song. In rehearsals, Hoggett, to enlarge the meaning of this—the hope, the innocence—asked the people playing the bank clerks to show him, in movement, what they thought clerks did all day. “Each sat at his desk—that was his intimate space—and I said, What do your hands do?” The actors did some mime: they rubber-stamped, they filed, they had migraines. Then came the second half. “I asked them, if your hands could dream in that space, where would they go? And what I got were all these little squid-like motions—hands dreaming.” He took those two strings of gestures and used them to fashion a semi-abstract movement sequence, the first half staccato, the second wiggly and floaty. It didn’t exactly look like drudgery vs. escape, but it felt that way. Hoggett tells me that, before teaching the actors such phrases, he never tells them they are about to do a dance. They would freeze on the spot. They think they can’t dance.

“Once,” which had its New York première at New York Theatre Workshop, a two-hundred-seat house in the East Village, moved to Broadway in 2012, and received eleven Tony nominations, more than any other production that season. Hoggett was nominated for best choreography.

The revival of Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie” was even more acclaimed, and in terms of what Hoggett has said is his real métier, physical narrative, it may be his greatest achievement to date. Laura, the shy, crippled daughter of the family, suppresses, with a wrenching effort, her shyness in order to entertain Jim, a supposed “gentleman caller”; her mother, Amanda, insists. Eventually, however, Laura discovers that, far from being a suitor, Jim is engaged to another girl. The revelation is crushing to her, and more crushing to Amanda—a former Southern belle, or so she tells us—who soon appears and finds out the truth. In this production, Laura turned to Amanda, and pressed against the front of her body. “She falls into her mother,” Hoggett said. “She wants to be absorbed by her mother.” Like the lovers in “Once,” Laura and Amanda didn’t embrace. The loss is so shocking and rings a bell for so many years to come that to hold each other would be too neat and easy. Hoggett told me that the moment was one of those collaborative actions that he had spoken of earlier. He and the director, John Tiffany, with Cherry Jones, who performed the role of Amanda, and Celia Keenan-Bolger, who was a masterly Laura, had decided together: no hug.

In the rehearsal period, Hoggett likes to give actors exercises in which they have to make up a scene—a scene not in the play—about their relationship with another central character. To Celia Keenan-Bolger, he said, “I want you to take Amanda to a place in the house and physically mend her.” Keenan-Bolger told me, “Initially, I had no idea what he was talking about. I led Cherry to the edge of the stage. Then I looked her in the eyes to try to communicate that she didn’t need to worry about me, and ran away. From that, Steven said, ‘Why don’t you push her a little further and don’t look in her eyes. Just walk away.’ ” Keenan-Bolger may not have known, at the beginning, what Hoggett meant by “mending,” but Jones did: Amanda was not going to be mended. Jones said to me that while Laura is entertaining Jim, Amanda is downstairs, in the kitchen, drumming her fingers on the counter: One Mississippi, two Mississippi. “She thinks how nice it will be,” Jones said. “The man will take care of Laura and of her. They will have a little room for her next to the kitchen.” This will not come to pass, and Laura, by pushing Amanda to the edge of the stage and then leaving her there—on the edge, incidentally, of a sinister moat of black liquid, like the River Styx, which encircles the stage (brilliant set design by Bob Crowley)—has already said that to herself. Indeed, she has said it to Amanda as well, so that Jones, when she comes out at the end of the scene, will have more material to work on. Amanda will never have a nice little room next to the kitchen. From now on, all will be toil and anxiety.

Movement direction is a new trend, or a newly revived one. Lots of shows have it and, like “The Glass Menagerie,” are greatly enriched by it. I spoke to Hoggett about where this could lead: to plays that were dancelike, and dance shows that were playlike. The prospect didn’t bother him. He clearly loves fluidity. Collaborators decide things together. Movement penetrates text. Abstraction grows out of representation. A song may surface briefly, like a fish out of the sea, and then plunge down again.

In our time, this is a nontraditional and notably un-narcissistic position—which doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s good. For example, movement can be overstressed, and intrusive. This is the case with “What’s It All About?,” a plotless medley of Burt Bacharach songs—performed by a vaguely unified group of singers in street clothes—for which Hoggett was the director as well as the movement director. Perhaps the problem with the show was just Bacharach’s anodyne songs, but its plotlessness must also have been a difficulty for Hoggett. As he has said, he wants a story. Without incident or character, the performers, while singing perfectly well, spent the rest of the time dithering around and looking at one another with intense but unspecified meaning. In this show, it seemed, Hoggett was conducting an experiment: Could movement that was neither abstract nor narrative combine with music to make an interesting night at the theatre? No, or not yet, or not for him. But in the other shows that he has worked on recently in New York, all of them narrative, his enlargement of the meaning, or even just of the stage picture, via movement is bold.

The first preview of “Rocky” was a fraught event. For one thing, it was delayed a night. (There were “issues with Con Edison,” I was told.) Then came a monumental snowstorm. I thought that when the curtain finally rose the cast would be looking at a half-full house. Instead, the theatre was jammed, but there were still plenty of problems. There were difficulties with getting the set—a complicated business—to move, Hoggett said. Most important, he felt that the fight wasn’t right: “It’s not beat-perfect. It still hasn’t found its feet. It’s not valiant enough.” Such anguish is the rule, not the exception, among the makers of a show during previews.

Nobody but the makers seemed to mind, however. When the show was over, the audience gave it a clamorous ovation. Then Stallone came out on the stage, and the noise got louder. He said that he never imagined his little movie would turn out to be such a big thing. He told us that he was a homeboy, born nine blocks from the theatre, in Hell’s Kitchen. (His father began as a hairdresser; his mother was, at various times, an astrologer and a women’s-wrestling promoter.) Perhaps with a note of apology for setting his blockbuster in Philadelphia, he said to the audience, “Yo, New York, I love you.” The noise got even louder. ♦

Joan Acocella has written for The New Yorker, reviewing dance and books, since 1992, and became the magazine’s dance critic in 1998.